Description

Rogue is a turn-based dungeon crawler in which the player controls an adventurer who must explore the dangerous Dungeon of Doom in order to retrieve the precious Amulet of Yendor and make it out alive. The player character starts on the upper-most level and slowly makes his way downwards.

The game uses ASCII characters to represent locations, items, monsters, and the protagonist himself. There are twenty-six different types of monsters, symbolized by their initial letters (e.g. L for Leprechaun). Monsters have different abilities and modes of attack. The dungeon and the items in it are randomly generated each time the player begins a new game. Each dungeon level contains a grid of three by three rooms and dead ends.

Levels get progressively more complex and maze-like, and monsters grow in strength the deeper the hero ventures into the dungeon. The player character can acquire better weapons and armor, gain experience points and level up. Should the protagonist perish in the dungeon, the player must restart the game anew.

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Academic paper

A sophisticated mainframe-Rogue-playing AI, the "Rog-o-matic" (A Belligerent Expert System), was the subject of an academic paper written by Michael Maudlin, Guy Jacobson, Andrew Appel and Leonard Hamey of Carnegie Mellon University and presented at the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London Ontario, May 16, 1984.

Copy protection

The commercial Rogue versions didn't fare too well, as lots of pirated copies existed. The later DOS versions were copy protected (starting at the latest with V1.48 published by Epyx), in an interesting way. You could actually play a pirated copy, but if you did, you suffered six times the normal damage from monster attacks -- which quickly ended an already pretty hard game, it was hard to even get to level two. On the tombstone, you could then read the evocative message:

REST IN PEACE

Software Pirate

killed by

Copy Protection Mafia

Development

Rogue was first developed in 1980 on PLATO mainframes (first at Santa Cruz, then Berkeley), where it was extensively beta-tested by fellow Computing Science students. (Three months after moving to Berkeley, more compute cycles were used playing Rogue than running any other program.) The game's creators eventually calculated that their little diversion had used up approximately "a billion and a half dollars of compute time in Silicon Valley". Your taxpayer dollars at work!

Different versions

In keeping with the game's U.C. Berkeley roots, a public domain version of it was distributed with version 4.2 of the university's popular flavour of Unix -- the Berkeley Standard Distribution, or BSD. This ended up ensuring an enduring fondness for the game among a wide and international fanbase.

In 2006, Donnie Russell released a version called ClassicRogue, which features a graphical title screen optional mouse control, and sound effects.

When Epyx re-released the DOS version of Rogue in 1985, the main addition was a graphical title screen. The developer of this version, Jon Lane, one of the original developers of Rogue, didn't seem to have liked it: In the source code, the function to display that image is called "epyx_yuck"...

Programming

Written in a very early version of Lattice C (version 1.02, to be exact).